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Old 07-09-2018, 01:15 AM
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Papierschnitzel Papierschnitzel is offline
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Location: Vienna
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Pirate ship fleet builder

It is time to start a thread with my big plan for the upcoming weeks and months. Hopefully not years, but we will have to see


Sometime in spring I got inspired to build ships! A friend of mine invited my to a sailing holiday last year, then I saw the PotC movie again (just the first one) and I also saw some screenshots of a computer game that look at least visually amazing. I remembered how my father spent a lot of time scratch building ships out of wood. Us kids had the honour to tie all the tiny knots for the rigs.


For the fleet builder set I want to design a series of ships (for pirates and all their enemies) with the focus of gaming so like all my models I will focus on
  • build should be as easy as possible
  • good looking
  • variations in the looks or skins
  • sturdy enough for gaming


If I can make it, my visions is to have the following boats (number indicates length)
  • small rowing boat 4"
  • jolly boat 6"
  • gun boat (1 mast) 8"
  • sloop type (1 mast) 12"
  • brig type (2 masts) 16"
  • fregate (2 masts) 20" and
  • galleon (3 masts) 24"
The latter will be more advanced builds probably and take more time so I am not sure how many gamers will actually build them, but I have to make them for myself!



It doesn have to be wargamers all the time. I know our neighbours kids love to play with my papermodels with their LEGO minis!


So far I have completed the small rowing boat and sketched out the geometry of the next two.



Merging the need for a realistic look and gaming requirements isn't easy. I have seen a couple of papermodel ships for gaming and I found them very "blocky". One of the biggest challenges is that gaming figures have these bases that mess up the space requirement. People don't have these huge blocks around their feet


To accommodate this for the rowing boats I am making inlays for the rowing benches. That way one can either take them out completely to squeeze in more minis or switch between a realistic look and a more functional one.


For the jolly boat here I am using the realistic version ...

... and here I am switching to one where I can place the figures inside.
This way I was able to squeeze these five inside!


So that's it for my starting presentation of my big plans for the near future. I am hoping that all the awesome ship builders here might be able to give me some tips or feedback when I mess something important up or forget it. I am not sure if I will be able to incorporate everything but I am looking forward to all corrections made aware to me. If in the end some will enjoy building and playing with these and pro shipbuilders will not turn away in disgust I will be happy


I any case I am very excited and cannot wait to have a huge galleon in my shelf one day.


Cheers,
Chris
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